I think some of these experiment results are better explained by a bunch of different quirks in human thinking, not Only the affect heuristic. Maybe I’m overconfident in my knowledge here, but still I’m going to go through them in order:
The thing about the clock is obviously the affect heuristic at work and there doesn’t seem to be much more to it. The disease example I take issue with however. It seems to me that it’s rather about framing than about the affect heuristic. Though peoples emotions about a deadly disease is at play too, the crucial difference is between the way people either get to hear about either a bunch of people dying (relative frequency) or an abstract percentage. They get to imagine the people. Percentages are harder to think about, as it is not what our minds are naturally designed to do and that might be why relative frequency gets through to us better. (people also react more strongly to hear “out of every 1000 people who take this medication 1 gets side effects” (that person could be me!) then to hear “the chance of side-effects from this medication is 0,1%” (that souns like a low percentage...))
The two examples that follow further drives this point. Although theres a positive association with 98% as being close to the upper bound, the other example about the marbles is just an example of how we’re bad at learning to intuitively and automatically apply our knowledge of statistics. 7 marbles might feel like more because we somehow imagine “7 red, the rest white” (vs “1 red, the rest white”) but there’s no need to involve our emotions about these marbles to explain it.
The Finucane experiment is what I most associate directly with the affect heuristic. The subjects were using their feelings towards one aspect as a heuristic for judgeing the other aspects. (a bit like the halo effect really)
The last experiment I don’t feel I understand well enough to speak about.
(sorry if my english is bad, it’s not my first language. Also, this is my first comment here, I recently discovered this site. Hi! :D )
I fear that the most common context in which people learn about cognitive biases is also the most detrimental. That is, they’re arguing about something on the internet and someone, within the discussion, links them an article or tries to lecture them about how they really need to learn more about cognitive biases/heuristics/logical fallacies etc.. What I believe commonly happens then is that people realise that these things can be weapons; tools to get the satisfaction of “winning”. I really wish everyone would just learn this in some neutral context (school maybe?) but most people learn this with an intent, and I think it colours their use of rationality in general, perhaps indefinitely. :/ But maybe I’m just being too pessimistic.